Last week marked the 17th anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, a 7.9 magnitude tremor that devastated Sichuan province and tragically took the lives of nearly 100,000 people. On the May 12 anniversary this year, one particular Wenchuan-related item surged to the top of search engine Baidu and hot search lists on the social media forum Weibo. It involved an impromptu interview given on location one week after the 2008 quake by Li Xiaomeng (李小萌), a reporter from state broadcaster CCTV.

That old interview — and the selective way it was handled this year — illustrates how even decades-old disasters remain politically sensitive in China. While breaking disaster stories routinely face strict media controls, past tragedies are subject to equally careful narrative management, with inconvenient truths often airbrushed from official memory.

In the old broadcast shared on social media on May 12, Li comes across a farmer known simply as “Uncle Zhu” (朱大爷) as she strolls along a collapsed mountain road. Speaking in local dialect, Zhu stoically tells the journalist about the appalling conditions in the area. Through an interpreter, he explains to the reporter that he is returning home to harvest his rapeseed crops to “reduce the burden on the government” — meaning he will have income and not need to rely entirely on aid. By the end of the interview, Uncle Zhu is convulsed with sobs, the tragedy of the situation coming through.

Li posted last week on Weibo to commemorate the moment, revealing that Uncle Zhu had passed away in 2011. She said: “That conversation, with its unexpected, banal but heartbreaking details, showed all of us in China that people like Uncle Zhu, with their calm acceptance in the face of catastrophe, have the backbone to do what is right.” Other media, including China Youth Daily, an outlet under the Communist Youth League, have drawn on Li’s exchanges with Uncle Zhu in the years after the quake to commemorate the anniversary.

But a key portion of the television exchange was edited out of this year’s commemorative coverage. Near the midpoint of the original video, Li turns from her conversation with Zhu to interview several other farmers. One farmer explains that his child was killed in the earthquake, “buried in Beichuan First Middle School.” This exchange references the widespread collapse of shoddily constructed school buildings throughout the quake zone, resulting in the death of thousands of children. Revelations of school collapses initially drove a wave of public anger and a burst of Chinese media coverage — before the authorities came down hard.

These state-enforced patterns of amnesia when it comes to disasters, whether natural or human, tend to reinforce patterns of conduct that place real people at risk. This could be seen earlier this month as several tour boats capsized in Guizhou amid ignored weather warnings and inadequate safety measures. While there were hints in a handful of media reports at the deeper causes of the tragedy, which claimed 10 lives, most media followed the scripted reports of state media under a policy of media manipulation laid down by Hu Jintao in the aftermath of the Sichuan quake.

The amnesia extends to older historical traumas, bringing risks in the present. As author Tania Branigan warns in a recent interview with CMP about China’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when societies try to move on from collective trauma without confronting it, they “can’t understand themselves, and are much more vulnerable.”